How To Delete Yahoo Mail Account?

Easy steps to delete Yahoo! mail account

Closing an old or scarcely used email account may help you stay organized. But when it comes to Yahoo Mail, it may actually be a good idea to disable your account regardless of how often you use it.

With Yahoo suffering massive data breaches and selling itself to Verizon, you may want to delete the old Yahoo account. If you in case have important data in your account, you can download much of the data before you delete it, too.

Yahoo! has been in the news for quite some time. They had more than 500 million accounts hacked, and it recently rose to approximately 1 billion accounts. Of all the data breaches that rocked the tech world over the last few years, Yahoo really takes the cake. Check out this guide to learn how to delete Yahoo mail account permanently.

Before You Begin

Delete your Yahoo account and Yahoo will delete all the data associated with it, including your Yahoo emails, contacts and calendar events. If you have any important data stored in your Yahoo account, you’ll have to back it up first. If you’re paying for any services, such as Yahoo! Mail Pro, you’ll immediately lose access. Before closing down the account, make sure you download any information you may need in the future.

So here are the steps on how to delete Yahoo mail account permanently.

Step 1 – Sign in to the Yahooaccount termination page with the Yahoo ID you want to delete. (To find this, click the ‘Help’ link at the bottom-right corner of the page. Then click on the ‘My Account’ link at the bottom of that help page. Once on the ‘My Account’ page select ‘Register or delete account’, then click ‘closing your Yahoo account’ and click into the ‘account termination’ link from there.)

Step 2 – Read the given detailed information about the account termination and click Continue. Deleting your Yahoo account will also take away your access to all Yahoo services including Yahoo Mail, Flickr, contacts and others.

Step 3 – Enter your Yahoo account password to confirm your identity.

Step 4 –Type in the Captcha code displayed on the page to verify the changes.

Step 5 – Click the “Yes, terminate this account” button.

You’ll receive a prompt that your Yahoo account is terminated and the data will be deleted from Yahoo’s user database in approximately 90 days. Yahoo claims that the deletion process takes about 40 days to complete. However, it may take longer in certain countries.

After you terminate the account, any emails sent to it will bounce back to the sender with the delivery failure message.

If you happen to change your mind during the deletion period, you can still reactivate your account. To do that, simply log in to your account within 40 days. Once you have reactivated the account, people will be able to send emails to it once again. However, you will not be able to access any emails sent to the account’s address while it was closed.

Yahoo also informs that some of your data “might possibly remain” in its records even after the account is fully terminated. To find out more about which information may be stored, visit Yahoo’s Data Storage and Anonymization support page.